Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Very general UI feedback

I only started with BG3 after patch 5 dropped, so I've not got anything prior to compare to. I never played any prior BG titles, and got bored of DoS after 12 hours, so I can't make any comparisons in that department. I only ever heard of BG because I'm such a fan of PoE (both). So that's where I'm coming from here.

I wish there were:

* a control/alt/whatever key +click to send items to camp/wares instead of right-clicking
* a party-wide crouch interaction
* pause during non-combat without going into turn-based so one can issue orders to all the party at one go, then unpause
* when disbursing items from a crate, it would convenient if the modal closed when the last item is removed
* more clarity around concentration - I grew up on 2e and 3e, and I only know 5e from introducing my kids, and the complexity is such that my initial reaction to 5e was "holy crap, this should be a video game, not a pen and paper game!" THAC0 makes perfect sense to me, all the fiddly little 5e rules don't, so yay! make it a video game, but it's totally unclear to me through the UI when a character has concentration or not or what that means in practice

All the other stuff in other threads, movement & pathfinding, etc, that's all bug fixing, whatever. I liked a suggestion someone else made about making non-selected party members essentially ghosts until pathfinding is better. Other plot things... meh. This is strong as it is, especially for an early access act 1. I've happily dropped 10x as many hours into this as I did into the full-release DoS. The story is compelling, the acting is superb, and the mechanics aren't upsettingly troublesome, nothing unreasonable for EA status.

But those points above, those are the little naggy things that are repetitively annoying

What benefit should that bring? O_o
I mean ... what use do you have in mind for such feature?

This dont sound pleasant to me ...
I dont like when game does automaticaly anything that i didnt asked for, and closing containers when looting would be especialy anoying for me. :-/

“a control/alt/whatever key +click to send items to camp/wares instead of right-clicking“

Yes. Dear god, yes. It would make inventory much less painful.

Crrl + click = send to camp
Alt + click = send to wares

And we should be able to do this before it goes into inventory…ie, in the crate screen.

At least a dozen different ones that whoever ever played any half decent CRPG should easily imagine.

Problem is: that’s not a feature easily compatible with this game’s mandate to be constantly “multiplayer ready”.

Of course, the pause could still be made functional for single player only, but I doubt Larian is going to bother.

In that case it should be easy to list at least half dozen.

Yeah, it should be.
Maybe at some point I will even do it.

The primary reason is the one I gave initially - pause, issue positioning orders, then unpause and have everyone go where I've told them to. It's really, really awkward when trying to set up an encounter to have to ungroup, then one-by-one have people slink off to where I want them. I think of pause like a huddle. "Gale, over by those rocks, Asterion, up on that bluff there, Lae, after the initial volley, you just charge up the middle, I'll pick off the weakened ones... 1, 2, 3, break!" Then when everyone is in position, pause, give everyone an attack target, and unpause for simultaneous fire

good points OP, i want to mention the pause system a little more in detail.

just a quick demonstration then of why i like a proper pause system.

Open BG1 and try to move your characters to four different parts of a town map all at once while paused (this is a tactical game isn't it? i'd like to be able to give orders to my troops before they all start running about).

I just did it. This is what it involved:

BG1

1. clicked space bar
2. click first character
3. click move
4. click second character
5. click move
6. repeat for however many characters you have.
7. click space bar again
8. watch all characters do what they were told to do all at once.

Now, let's try that for BG3 in the druids grove.

1. click the first character and drag their portrait away from the others
2. click the second character and drag their portrait away from the others
3. repeat until everyone is separated
4. click space bar to enter turn based mode
5. wait for animation of turn based mode and sound
6. click character you want to move
7. click where you want them to move
8. watch while they move a certain distance
9. click second character
10. click..you get the idea
11. so you've moved all four characters a certain distance, according to how far they can move in a single turn
12. click next turn.
13. all npcs play an animation
14. go back to first character and click them to go a bit further towards their final destination.
15. repeat for all characters
16. 10 minutes later, they've eventually reached their places.

This right here is why I despise the lack of a proper pause and the awful party controls. It's painfully clear this entire system was built to facilitate multiplayer and ONLY multiplayer. sure, you can just not pause and move them much easier, but then you lose the whole tactical aspect of planning out your party's actions/movement

Why would you want to give your party orders to move to different areas of the map while paused and then have them move while unpaused? Because i like to have an overview of what my team is doing. i want to be able to say "okay, the fighter will stand there, the mage will be behind this fence out of los, the bard will be on the hill", etc and then have my team move to those positions. Having to make every little move one at a time exponentially increases the time it requires to do this and also makes it impossible to get a birds eye view of your overall team and where they will be going.

Maybe i'm just crazy

In fairness, you can hotkey this - I use `, and I've read others do too, but it's still annoying. The idea of multiplayer-first is mindboggling to me. Maybe I'm just some asocial introvert, but I would have assumed weirdo asocial introverts are a pretty heavy demographic for these games. If I want to play a multiplayer game, I'll play Mario Kart with my kids.

If you want to separate / connect all characters in the party, there is a "toggle group mode" button in the options. You just need to map it, because by default it's unmapped. So this part can be done with one click.

Yes, that is what i expected ...
You know all this you can allready do, right? So the only effect all that work would have would be estetic ... and i would even dare to say only potentialy.

Maybe you are.
BTW, jut out of curiocity ... why exactly did you start turnbased mode? O_o
I mean, it certainly tripled number of points, wich is obviously your main focus, bcs you want to present us how horrible this system is ... but still, what advantage did that give you?
Or in other words ... if you "send your party to positions" in BG-1 (i didnt play it, concidering only your own post ... first part) as far as i know, that party was moving there in real time ... so why party in BG-3 is not also moving in real time? :P

Actualy its more like:
1. clicked hotkey for ungroup
2. click first character
3. click move (note that you dont need to watch them move, so there is no time loss)
4. click second character
5. click move
6. repeat for however many characters you have.
7. click space bar again (no need for this :P )
8. watch remaining characters that didnt yet do what they were told to do

As far as i know ... BG-3 seem one point shorter.
Unless you want to include attack ofcourse ... then you will either need to hide all your characters, wich can prolong the whole action by litteraly 4 button hits ... horrible, i know (but hopefully some group-stealth hotkey will be implemented in the near future, people are asking for it quite often) ... or, in some places you can actualy position your party well enough to not engage combat with all of them at once ... and therefore get at least "first hit" with everyone.

Please Ragnarok, go ahead and film yourself doing the "shorter" BG3 way. You love to talk about how there is obviously no better way to do anything than BG3, so show us. We're obviously playing the game very differently. O.o

Honestly, no, I don't. Even in turn-based, once I give a companion a "fire" order, they do it, and combat starts. I can't give every orders and have them do it simultaneously. Is there something I'm missing?

Partialy ...
As i said, hide is the key here ... they will never attack "simultaneously" that is true ... but if you hide your party, you can attack with every single character one-by-one right at the start ... (unless you get horribly unlucky with initiative roll).

> Hide whole party
> Position hole party
> Attack with first one > combat starts ...
> Attack with second one > joins the combat ...
> Attack with third one > joins the combat ...
> Attack with last one > joins the combat ...

Final effect? 4 attacks has ben made at start of the combat, just as you wanted.
(Actualy 5 attacks ... since, unless im mistaken, your character that initiated combat, gets turn unaffected by the fact that he just attacked, and can use another action.)
I admit, effects of this "tactic" varies, based on how unlucky you get with your initiative ... if your first character is actualy first in turn, its super effective ... if its last, well not so much.
But this is just the thing with turn based combat, with initiative ... in other words, this works as intented.

Seriously, what the fuck is wrong between you and the letter S?


P.S. That description of why the current system is clumsy is basically the same thing I wrote months ago about why the "toilet chain system" is utter shit:

Sure, you can do that, but it's not the same thing at all. It feels like an awkward workaround for not having a real pause feature. And because it's so many manual steps, with combat kicking off right away, fat-fingering a key or hitting space bar or something out of muscle memory, it can have results that can only be fixed by reloading a save. And similarly, when you're just walking around or whatever, sometimes you want to pause so you can redirect movement suddenly.

The problem with ungrouping party members and putting them in stealth is, the world isn't actually standing still, and if something randomly moves around and they fall into visual range then they'll have to pass a stealth check. Unless they're in clear light, in which case stealth always fails.

+1000

This would be so much better to plan attacks or ambush and to jump into melee with some kind of synchronisation. At the moment it's impossible to move all your characters at the same time in different directions...
Same with the traps like those in the chapel. It's so slow in turn base... real time with pause outside combats would not break the flow of our exploration way less.
Same when I want to pause for 2 seconds just to look at something... Here I have to go turn base, look at what I want, press space 4 times, wait for 6 seconds, click the turn base button again...